Resource Alert: Moundsville, a documentary

By Jessica Salfia

Well, it’s day 9,789,573 of distance learning, distance teaching, and (if you are a parent), helping your own children navigate their distance learning assignments.

During these last 5 weeks when I’m not teaching or communicating with students, I have been trying to find constructive ways to occupy my brain to distract from the constant worry, anxiety, and fear that most of us are experiencing. I have been gardening like a mad woman, baking all the things, and lately, I have made a foray into edible flower recipes.

I also have been doing a little writing and watching a lot of TV (I am finding my brain too distracted for reading at the moment)—catching up on all the shows and documentaries I don’t usually have time for during the traditional school year.

There is one documentary I recently revisited that you should put on your “to watch list” in the next few weeks.

Question: What does an Adena burial mound from 200 B.C, Lady Gaga, Charles Manson, the United Steelworkers, our state Poet Laureate and the Fostoria glass company have in common?

Moundsville, West Virginia.

from Moundsville 

And you will discover the threads that connect these things and people by visiting the Moundsville website and watching John Miller and Dave Bernabo’s documentary, Moundsville, airing May 25^th on West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

Moundsville is the story of an Appalachian town told through the voices of its people—a refreshing change from the extraction narratives that delivered us Hillbilly Elegy and this recent, awful essay about a woman escaping New York with her puppy to “somewhere in Appalachia.”

No, Moundsville is not outside looking in. It’s story blossoms out of the mound it is named for, and its residents are the ones who tell that story starting from the days the earliest settlers discovered the towering mound while hunting through the rise and fall of coal and industry to the arrival of WalMart.

from Moundsville 

The documentary also focuses on the issue that so many Appalachian towns are faced with: the struggle to stay. The young residents of Moundsville talk about digging in or leaving for other opportunities.

from Moundsville 

My favorite part of this documentary is that the narrative is controlled completely by the town’s residents. They get to the tell the story of their place and share their pride, their sadness, their fears. And through this format, Moundsville manages to reckon with deeper truths about the American economy and America’s future.

W.Va. State Poet Laureate, Marc Harshman in Moundsville

One of the featured Moundsville residents is W.Va. state poet laureate, Marc Harshman. I am a huge fan of Marc’s and have written about his poetry for this blog before. You can read that post here. Marc has been writing about Moundsville for many years, and one of my all time favorite Harshman poems is this one, a poem I read many years ago long before it was featured on the Moundsville website:

You can find the text of this poem on the Moundsville website along with many other resources that could be used in ELA, Science, and Social Studies classrooms.

The Moundsville website is a treasure trove of resources that can be paired with the documentary, or used independently. John Miller, one of the documentary’s creators, runs a blog on the website that continues to share stories, interviews, and updates from the people of Moundsville. I dove into the blog a few days ago and found myself engrossed immediately in both the wide variety of stories, but also how the blog captured the same element I loved about the documentary: focus on the people and their stories through their gaze, not an outsider’s.

I recently communicated with Mr. Miller, who made it clear he would be happy to help teachers find ways to use this documentary or its accompanying resources in their classrooms. You reach out to John through his website here. This documentary and its resources would be an excellent addition to any West Virginia History or Appalachian studies curriculum, but also, this doc would be a great study on perspective and narrative in an ELA course–focusing on what story gets told and how you tell it when you let the people of a place tell their own story.

You can watch Moundsville for free on May 25, 2020 on West Virginia Public Broadcasting, it’s free online for residents of Marshall County, and available for everyone else to rent for $3.99. (You can purchase from vimeo as well for class use.)

WVCTE is wondering…

What did you think of Moundsville? Let us know when you watch this documentary and how you see it being used in a classroom!

A Love Letter to Poetry

By Karla Hilliard

I am about to tell you how I became a teacher. 

I became a teacher for either the most naive or idealistic reasons, but probably a combination of the two. It is because of poetry. 

I love it. Love it with a sustaining, carry my favorite collections as holy, memorizing poems to give myself the shivers at will love. 

This is a true story. When I was in Miss Smithson’s 2nd grade class at Hurricane Town Elementary, our reading textbook had a poem in it called “My Dog.” Tiny me was so taken by this little rhyming ditty, I memorized the whole thing. Want to hear it? It goes…

“My Dog” by Author Unknown (by the author of this blog post) 

He didn’t bark at anything

A cat, a bird, a piece of string

A siren or a silly toad

A pickup truck along the road

A fence, a bone, a chewed up shoe

He barked because he wanted to

Poetry! 

I grew up in a home with books. When I was a child, my mom read to me. She was wonderful that way. But I didn’t grow up with poetry books. Bible verses were about as close as I got or music. My dad is a music guy, and he did his part to model how to adequately freak out over beautiful, resonate lines and lyrics. When we’re together now and in a listening mood, we still sometimes compare our goose pimply arms at a turn of phrase. 

In 7th grade, in another textbook, I encountered the lyrics to “Blowin’ in the Wind” and I thought it was really something. And in the 12th grade, it was all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets in the very back of my very heavy literature book. 

I had a great job that year at a Baskin Robbins tucked inside of a BP gas station, and during the cold winter months, the store was totally dead. I had the green booths all to myself with the occasional, satisfying bing of a register. But in pre-social media teenage existence, I had to figure out on my own how to get unbored. On a particularly empty and snowy evening at work, I took out the one book I had: the literature textbook. That night, I read words I understood strung together in an order I didn’t. I found them intensely beautiful. 

And I wanted more. 

I had no idea what to do with my life so I majored in English. One incredibly influential professor (and poet), Jim Harms at West Virginia University, introduced another universe of poetry and writing to me. In his workshop class, I had to write poems (cringe), I had to read a bunch of poetry and talk about craft and structure and meaning, and I had to attend a reading. A what? A reading! Lucky me. It was a poet named Terrance Hayes and he had a new book out called Hip Logic. 

Poetry had me. And I had poetry. But I had no idea what to do with an English degree. So I chose teaching. 

I wish I could tell you that from a young age I knew teaching was my destiny, or that really, I wanted to teach “for the kids.” I didn’t know of any destinies that needed manifesting, and I didn’t not like kids. I was a coach and camp counselor and a big sister to a much younger sibling. This is a secret, but “the kids” are not the reason I ended up becoming a teacher. 

It was poetry. 

And while naive, wonderfully so I think, I wanted to share poetry with people. In this part of the story, the people I’d be sharing it with was destined. In 2005, I walked into my own classroom for the first time and the first unit I planned on my own was modeled after my favorite classes. We read, we wrote, we workshopped. I had no idea if I was teaching standards, but I did what worked for me and what moved my students.

I have always worked hard to help students discover poetry, their own favorite poets, the poems that will make them shake their heads and leave them in awe. 

Fast forward 15 years, and the most important discovery I’ve made is that contemporary poetry is a key that unlocks this door for students. 

I have found a kindred spirit in the #TeachLivingPoets founder, friend, and colleague, Melissa Smith. Her infectious enthusiasm and passion for contemporary poetry propels me forward and empowers me to experiment, share, and grow just what it means to be a poetry teacher and the ways in which poetry moves students in authentic and exciting ways. 

Today, I live out these shared core beliefs of the #TeachLivingPoets community in my classroom: 

1. We seek to get poetry into the hands of students.
2. We seek to complicate the canon, to open the door wider of which poems are taught in the classroom.
3. We seek to provide students with poetry that reflects their identities, backgrounds, and present circumstances.
4. We seek to expose students to new ideas and to people who are different than them.
5. We seek to uplift the voices of BIPOC poets, LBGTQ+ poets, and poets with disabilities.
6. We seek to celebrate the arts in schools, especially poetry.
7. We seek to empower students’ voices through reading and writing poetry.

One of the tenets of Teach Living Poets is putting poetry into the hands of our students and connecting them to real, living, available writers.

My school’s Poetry Out Loud program, which I co-coordinate (like most things, WVCTE for example) with my teaching partner and colleague, Jessica Salfia, is growing into a day long festival and celebration of art, poetry, and writing. 

This year, we welcomed guest judges and poets José Olivarez and Keegan Lester for our competition and a performance and Q&A for and with our students. 

For this poetry celebration day, we held our school POL competition, with 15 students—9th through 12th graders—reciting and performing poetry. We heard poems by Robert Hayden, Jamaal May, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Nikki Giovanni, William Shakespeare, and Hanif Abdurraqib (who we were extremely fortunate to host last year as our guest poet), among many others. 

Our students had the opportunity to attend a reading. A what? A reading! They also engaged in a Q&A with our two guest poets, and got an education different in both kind and degree. They learned from two real writers about writing. 

You can read more about this day here, where the winner and an extraordinary student I’m lucky to call my own, Rheá Ming says of her performance poem “For the Dogs Who Barked At Me on the Sidewalks in Connecticut” by Hanif Abdurraqib, “I think the content of the poem spoke to me as far as finding an identity.” 

I could go on…

But the thing I’ll leave you with is not just my own devotion and love to poetry, but why it matters now that it’s taken me 15 years into a career that has changed and shaped my life, and I hope the lives of some of the students I’ve had the privilege of teaching. 

Poetry can speak to us, for us, and about us. Poetry gives us solace—we turn to it in our most difficult and darkest times, but also in times of great love and joy. It asks and answers questions; it places demands on us. Poetry ain’t easy. Neither is living.

I want this for students—this beautiful and challenging grappling with language and ideas, and when they find themselves, their questions, their struggles, identities, and desires in a poem, we have done something together that transcends any standards or exam. We have done life work. 

One young man Michael said just yesterday of José Olivarez, “I didn’t know this is what poetry could be.” 

Thank you poetry. I love you. 

For lessons, activities, reviews, and inspiration, make sure to visit http://www.teachlivingpoets.com.

Art as Argument

By Jessica Salfia

Understanding visual rhetoric is not just an important part of most AP Language and Composition curriculums, but it is an essential skill our students need as members of society. We are bombarded with images—images intended to persuade and influence us. Our students must be able to identify the arguments and claims in both text and images.

I have been crafting visual analysis lessons and units in my classroom for several years, and I have written about the importance of cultivating visual analysis skills for the WVCTE blog before. You can read that post here.

These lessons have taken the shape of a unit in my AP Lang class called “the Argument for Art” that culminates in trip to the National Gallery of Art and a research analysis essay modeled after the essay “The Capricious Camera” by Laila Ayad. Recently, several teachers have reached out asking about some of these activities, so for today’s post, here is an overview of this unit:

Introduction: Appalachian Studies Unit

My students are introduced to images as argument early in the year in our Appalachian Studies unit. Besides numerous written texts, we study several visual texts that complicate and disrupt the single story of Appalachia. We discuss how the Looking at Appalachia project complicates and disrupt the single story of our region. This project was in reaction to the “war on poverty” photos that have become representative of our region.  Karla Hilliard has written about how she uses Looking at Appalachia in her classroom for the WVCTE blog, and you can read that post here.  We analyze how the photography of Builder Levy complicates the idea that the West Virginia coal fields were populated by a white, homogenous workforce, and we study the Appalshop documentary, Sludge, as a visual essay. We then read the illustrated novel, Trampoline, by Robert Gipe and discuss the way Gipe uses his text and his illustrations to create a complete idea or argument.

After this unit, students are primed for Art as Argument.

Day 1-4 Edward Hopper and Joyce Carol Oates

We begin with a painting by Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942.

Students spend a day analyzing and discussing the painting, and then read the poem Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, 1942 by Joyce Carol Oates. We talk about if we think Oates’ analysis is accurate, and we discuss what visual elements led her to those conclusions. Then, students choose another painting by Hopper, and write a poem using Oates’ poem as a mentor text. This specific lesson is detailed in this blog post with handouts included.

Days 5-8 The Capricious Camera

Next, we read, analyze, and annotate the essay, “The Capricious Camera” by Laila Ayad. In this essay, Ayad analyzes  a black and white photo from World War II captioned, “Mounted Nazi Troops on the Lookout for Likely Polish Children.” See the photo below:

Ayad’s essay is an excellent model for visual analysis, but also for how to use research and source material to support your claims. I start with asking my students “What do you notice about the author’s interpretation of the photo? And what do you notice about how research impacted the analysis?” After discussing in small Socratic groups and as a whole class, I tell the class that this essay will serve as their mentor text for their own analysis of an artwork.

(This essay can be found in the ninth edition of the Bedford Reader, but can be a bit tough to locate online. Here is a PDF copy: capricious_camera_essay copy)

Days 9-13: Bansky Does New York

Next, we look at how art of all kinds, not just photography can function rhetorically by watching and discussing the documentary, Bansky Does New York. This documentary focuses on a 31 day self-proclaimed residency and pop-up project that occurred in and around New York City in October of 2013.

From the HBO.com description:

On October 1, 2013, the elusive British street artist known as Banksy launched a self-proclaimed month-long residency in New York City, posting one unique exhibit a day in an unannounced location, sparking a 31-day scavenger hunt both online and on the streets for Banksy’s work.

Capturing this month of madness, Banksy Does New York incorporates user-generated content, from YouTube videos to Instagram photos, from New Yorkers and Banksy hunters alike, whose responses became part of the work itself, for an exhilarating, detailed account of the uproar created by the mysterious artist.

With installations spanning all five boroughs of New York City, and including a mix of stencil graffiti, sculpture, video and performance art, Banksy touched on such wide-ranging subjects as fast-food wages, animal cruelty in the meat industry, civilian casualties in Iraq and the hypocrisy of the modern art world. Daily News reporter Beth Stebner, who covered Banksy’s residency, was struck by the wide array of people drawn to his work, noting, “You had art students, you had plumbers, you had gallery owners. It just brought New Yorkers out.”

The film is wonderful because of all the art analysis, but also because the focus is how Bansky’s work is functioning rhetorically. In the final moments of the documentary, Banksy’s voice over can be heard saying, “The artist asserts…” We try to hone in on the rhetorical elements of Bansky’s project and what he was arguing with the project.

Day 14: National Gallery of Art

The students are ready now to pick out a piece of art to analyze. I give them this handout which details due dates and expectations for the final paper of this unit:

Art Analysis Paper Task Sheet

I live in a place where we can take a 2hr train ride to D.C. and visit the National Gallery of Art, but this part of the project could easily be done at a local small scale museum or gallery, or even online with a webquest or a digital museum tour.

However, one of the most special days of the year with my students is when we get out of the classroom, and set off to explore the museum together. It’s a great community building and bonding experience, and one of the most memorable parts of the course.

Their goal(s) of the day is to pick a piece of art they see functioning as an argument, but also to have a lot of fun. (And I may have given them the challenge of “find a piece of art that looks like you”. Here are some hilarious kids from this year’s trip.)

Days 15-21 (or longer): The Paper

The final product of this unit is a research essay in which the student analyzes the piece of art they have selected on our trip. Again, The Capricious Camera is their mentor text for this assignment. We take this paper through the whole writing process. The final product is a 4-6 page research essay, and I also use this assignment as an opportunity to shore up my students knowledge of MLA formatting, in-text citations, and embedding figures into a paper.

Conclusion

This unit produces some of the most thoughtful analysis and conversations about rhetoric and language of the year, and definitely produces some of the best student writing I get to score. For most students, this paper is always one they select as one of their best pieces of writing and this unit as one of their favorite assignments when we do end of course evaluations.

Do you use art and visual rhetorical in your classroom? Share with us how!

WVCTE is wondering….

How do you incorporate visual analysis into your ELA curriculum? How does art play a role in how you teach English? Message us and let us know, or share with us on Facebook or Twitter!

Metaphorically Speaking

Me: “Today we are going to talk about poetry! Who’s excited?”

Every class I’ve ever had: *crickets*

I’m not sure about your students, but mine don’t love poetry.  A few years ago, when we switched to the standards which shall not be named and our focus shifted to informational text, I saw a downward trend in the ability of my students to “attack” a poem.  For a lot of them, even my advanced kids, poetry is challenging and really makes them think.  My students, especially the ones who are used to breezing through with good grades, hate being wrong!  They hate doing work that can be subjective and more open to interpretation.  When the work is more gray than black and white, my students tend to express their vulnerability through negative comments and closing themselves off from peer-to-peer or teacher-to-student interaction.

For years, I’ve taught my students the TP-CASTT method of poetry analysis as one way to attack a poem.  It’s formulaic, but for students who shudder at the mere mention of the word poetry (think of the hyena in The Lion King who shudders at the word “Mufasa”), it provides an icebreaker.

TP-CASTT is an acronym for a method of poetry analysis:

T – Title – Before reading the poem, read the title and consider what the poem might be about.

P – Paraphrase – Put the plot of the poem into your own words.

C – Connotation – Mark the figurative language in the poem.

A – Attitude – Identify the tone(s) within the poem.

S – Shift – Identify any shifts within the poem.

T – Title (again) – Re-examine the title on an interpretive level.

T – Theme – Identify the possible theme(s) of the poem.

For the most part, I can anticipate that students will struggle most with tone and theme when we’re working with poems, but occasionally the figurative language struggle is real!  This has been one of those years.

As my students were working with Plath’s “Mirror,” I realized that a review of simile and metaphor was needed.  While students could rattle off the definitions of the terms, and they could even identify them in the poem, they struggled understanding the metaphor because they were struggling with the context.  When my students came to class the next day, we paused our study of “Mirror” and instead focused just on metaphors through what I like to call an “arts and crafts day.”

As they entered the classroom, each student received a blank piece of printer paper and an index card with a one-line metaphor.  Some of the metaphors I borrowed from other poems or song lyrics: “Hope is the thing with feathers…” and “my heart is a stereo…,” for example.  Others I made up: “Bill is the bacon in my BLT…” and “she is a prime number” were two of my favorites.  My students were challenged to write a poem that included the metaphor and provided context and meaning for it.  Once their poems were drafted, they wrote their final versions on the printer paper and illustrated it to add to the context of the poem.

        

     

Once students were asked to create context and meaning for a metaphor, they were able to apply that skill to a reading a “Mirror” and were able to apply metaphor to theme.

I don’t know that I’m ever going to have a classroom full of students who sit and read poetry for fun, but as their knowledge and skills grow and develop, they are less reluctant to interact with a poem.  At the end of the day, I want my classroom to be full of chattering students rather than chirping crickets (metaphorically speaking).

 

WVCTE is wondering how you engage your students with poetry.  What are the biggest obstacles to understanding and student engagement?  What is your favorite poetry lesson?

 

 

Contemporary Appalachian Literature: Collections & Anthologies for Your Classrooms and Curriculums

By Jessica Salfia

With the new school year in full swing, I’ve seen teachers all over Facebook and Twitter sharing donors choose projects and Amazon Wish Lists filled with books for their classroom libraries and curriculums. As you continue buy books to diversify your classroom libraries, think about the ways Appalachia is represented in your classroom. How are you disrupting single stories of this region?

The WVCTE blogging team has written before about the ways we have worked to teach our students and our colleagues about the importance and power of place.  You can search the “Appalachian Studies” category to read some of these blogs or check out the Appalachian syllabus tab on this website.  There are so many novels by regional writers that we love: Southernmost by Silas House, Trampoline and Weedeater by Robert Gipe, A Land More Kind than Home by Wiley Cash, Strange As This Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake to name a few.

But oftentimes the pace of the school year does not allow time to teach an entire text, so it’s important to also know where to find quality short fiction, essays, and poetry by Appalachia’s finest.

This year the Shepherd University Appalachian Heritage Writer in Residence is Crystal Wilkinson, and my students read her book Water Street this summer as part of their introduction to Appalachian studies.

According to the Kentucky University Press website:

“The residents of Water Street are hardworking, God-fearing people who live in a seemingly safe and insulated neighborhood within a small Kentucky town: “Water Street is a place where mothers can turn their backs to flip a pancake or cornmeal hoecake on the stove and know our children are safe.” But all is not as it seems as the secret lives of neighbors and friends are revealed in interconnected tales of love, loss, truth, and tragedy.

In this critically acclaimed short story collection, Crystal Wilkinson peels back the intricate layers that form the fabric of this community and its inhabitants—revealing emotionally raw, multifaceted tales of race, class, gender, mental illness, and interpersonal relationships. The thirteen succinct stories offer fragmented glimpses of an overarching narrative that emerges, lyrical and fierce. Featuring a new foreword and a new afterword which illuminate Wilkinson’s artistic achievement, this captivating work is poised to delight a new generation of readers.”

When I was building lessons for my students around Wilkinson’s text, I started thinking about how important collections of short fiction and anthologies are to ELA curriculums. We don’t just need contemporary and diverse novels in our curriculums, but we also need contemporary and diverse poetry, short stories, and essays. (shout out #TeachLivingPoets)

So without further ado, below are four collections of Appalachian prose and poetry that I think belong in every secondary classroom library.

(And the only reason that Wilkinson isn’t on my list below is because my students will get to meet her in a few weeks, and I’ve got a whole blog post planned that is reserved exclusively for her genius. Stay tuned.)

Collections & Anthologies for Your Classrooms and Curriculums

1. The Sound of Holding Your Breath by Natalie Sypolt

A native West Virginian, Natalie Sypolt’s debut book is a collection of powerful short stories set in contemporary Appalachia that feature characters pushed to their breaking points.  You’ll recognize many people in Sypolt’s stories: the boy next door, the girl next door, the preacher’s son, the waitress at your local diner, the overworked teacher, the vet struggling with PTSD, the vet’s wife struggling to understand and help her husband.  But while perhaps recognizable, Sypolt’s characters are anything but ordinary.

From the WVU Press website:

“…tragedy and violence challenge these unassuming lives: A teenage boy is drawn to his sister’s husband, an EMT searching the lake for a body. A brother, a family, and a community fail to confront the implications of a missing girl. A pregnant widow spends Thanksgiving with her deceased husband’s family. Siblings grapple with the death of their sister-in-law at the hands of their brother. And in the title story, the shame of rape ruptures more than a decade later.”

Many of Sypolt’s stories are a perfect fit for secondary ELA classrooms. In my classroom, I have crafted creative writing lessons around “Diving,” “Ghosts,” “Lettuce,” and “Stalking the White Deer.” Whether for a lesson or classroom library, add this book to your “to read” pile soon!

2. Shall We Gather at the River, edited by David Joy and Eric Rickstad

There is more one essay in this collection that left me with tears in my eyes and my heart overflowing. Full disclosure: I love fishing. But whether you are a fisherman or not, these essays will move you and your students. And while the stories in this collection are about fishing, they are also the ways we connect to nature, each other, and ourselves. There are essays that will make you laugh and essays that will make you cry. And if you have any reluctant readers who are also sportsman, I can guarantee there is an essay in here for them.  Featuring Appalachian writers—Ron Rash and Silas House to name a few—throughout the collection and writers from around the country, this anthology was one of my favorite reads of the summer.

3. Appalachian Reckoning, edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll

J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy has been one of the most controversial and contentious books written about our region in decades. Since its publication in 2016, writers, activists, and teachers from the region have been refuting and rejecting Vance’s inaccurate portrayal of Appalachia. In this collection from WVU Press, writers from across Appalachia respond to the single story that, thanks to Vance’s novel, was once again thrust to forefront. Featuring prose, poetry, and photography from a wide-range of diverse authors, this book is a treasure trove of classroom resources.  If you are looking to disrupt the single story of Appalachia for yourself or your students, get this collection in your classroom.

4. LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia,edited by Jeff Mann and Julia Watts

Once you put down Appalachian Reckoning, pick up this and continue disrupting your single story of Appalachia with this anthology, also from WVU Press. I just finished this beautiful collection of poetry and prose last week and have added it to my classroom library.

From the WVU Press website:

“This collection, the first of its kind, gathers original and previously published fiction and poetry from lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer authors from Appalachia. Like much Appalachian literature, these works are pervaded with an attachment to family and the mountain landscape, yet balancing queer and Appalachian identities is an undertaking fraught with conflict. This collection confronts the problematic and complex intersections of place, family, sexuality, gender, and religion with which LGBTQ Appalachians often grapple.

With works by established writers such as Dorothy Allison, Silas House, Ann Pancake, Fenton Johnson, and Nickole Brown and emerging writers such as Savannah Sipple, Rahul Mehta, Mesha Maren, and Jonathan Corcoran, this collection celebrates a literary canon made up of writers who give voice to what it means to be Appalachian and LGBTQ.”

Happy reading!

WVCTE wants to know…

if and when YOU include any of these works into your curriculums or classroom libraries! Shout us out on Facebook, Twitter, or via email with a picture and tell us how it goes! We want to hear from you.